Large hail is not a killer, but does considerable damage Hail

Falling from 20,000 feet or higher, large hailstones pack quite a punch!

Large hail does significant damage to cars.

Hail is also tough on airplanes

Hail can go right through your roof

Hail also knocks down crops, annually causing damage in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars (

Average annual number of days with hail

This hailstone fell at a town called Aurora, NE on June 22, At that time it was the biggest one ever found.

The Aurora hailstone was 7 inches in diameter. Imagine that falling on your head from 20,000 feet up !

This is the record-holder before 2003, the Coffeyville hailstone with some props (egg, hand) for comparison.

The Coffeyville hailstone cut into sections. Notice the layers This stone fell on Coffeyville, KS on Sept 3, 1970.

You can see the hail embryo at the center. Hail embryos are the ice particles that occupy the center of hailstones and serve as cores for their initial growth. The rings are caused by different growth regimes. Clear ice is deposited slowly and contains few air bubbles. Cloudy ice occurs when water freezes quickly, trapping the air bubbles

As of July 2010, we have a new record-holder

This is it. The Vivian hailstone (volleyball sized?)

Hail is often categorized by its size in relation to everyday objects

Diameters of hail and the everyday objects used as adjectives (e.g., baseball-sized hail is 2.75” in diameter) Marble

Oneonta hail, June 15, This is marble-sized

Those are small pine cones for comparison.

Here’s our radar with the hook echo again. Tornadic thunderstorms often also have large hail. The hailfall area is close to the tornado.

Ingredients for Hail Growth 3 Main “ingredients” In a basic sense, 3 Main “ingredients” are required: Adequate updraft 1. Adequate updraft to keep hailstone aloft (where temperatures are -10 to -30C) for an appropriate amount of time, Sufficient supercooled water 2. Sufficient supercooled water near the hailstone to enable growth during transit through an updraft embryo 3. A piece of ice or snow (embryo) for it to grow upon

Vertical cross section of a typical hailstorm (tornadic thunderstorms usually have hail).

141 Hail reports one year ago, 17 being large (2” +)

Here are some of the large hail reports from that day

Another day where the severe weather was mostly hail, some of which was REALLY large.

You saw this when we learned about downbursts. In addition to the 572 wind reports, there were also 357 hail reports on April 19.

Hailstorm.flv